Citizenship Resounding

Abstract

Abstract This chapter offers a new theorization of music and citizenship through three extended case studies. Musicology has been making efforts for decades to think beyond the sovereign subject of liberalism, beyond Whiteness, and beyond able-bodiedness. But the complex of thinking around heroism, “greatness,” and Whiteness in music in relation to citizenship has proved notoriously hard to unravel beyond the professional academic core. The soundworlds of collectivity—of crowds and social movements—continue to be hard to describe, at least, with reference to our habitual ways of describing and analyzing music. The case studies focus on iconic figures, scenes, and soundworlds in Egypt, the United Kingdom, and Turkey—“The citizen on his bike,” “the citizen in the crowd,” and “the citizen in the square,” respectively—with these critical ends in mind. The key to these extremely complex scenes of citizenship-making, the chapter argues, lies in music, which helps us understand something important about the mobilization of citizenly iconography, its transmission, its mediation, and its affective and temporal dynamics.